Raspberry PI 4 at last!

It was with astonishment that I opened up my browser this morning to read some daily IT news, only to discover that the Raspberry PI v4 has finally arrived! And boy what a landslide update to the 3.x family it is!

Three times the fun

There are plenty of sites that entertains page-up and page-down with numbers, but I will save all that for an article where I have the physical kit in my posession. But looking at the preliminaries I think it’s safe to say that we are looking at a solid 3x the speed of the older yet capable PI 3b+.

The PI returns, and what a joy it is!

While the 3x speed boost is enough to bump the SoC up, from entertaining to serious for business applications – it’s ultimately the memory footprint that will make all the difference. While the Raspberry PI is probably the most loved SBC (single board computer) of all time, it’s always been cut short due to lack of memory. 512 megabyte can only do so much in 2019, and even the slimmest of Linux distributions quickly consumes more ram that older versions could supply.

VideoCore 6, two screens and 4k video

The new model ships in three different configurations, with 1, 2 and 4 gigabytes of ram respectively. I strongly urge people to get the 4Gb version, because with that amount of memory coupled with a good solid-state-disk, means you can enable a proper swap-partition. No matter how fast a SoC might be, without memory to compliment it – the system simply wont be able to deliver on its potential. But with 4Gb, a nice solid state disk (just use a SSD-To-USB with one of the sexy new USB 3.x ports) and you are looking at an OK mini-computer capable of most desktop applications.

I have to admit I never expected the PI to ship with support for two monitors, but lo-and-behold, the board has two mini-hdmi out ports! The board is also fitted with the VideCore 6 rather than VideoCore 4.

Not missing the boat with Oxygene and Elements

One of the most frustrating episodes in the history of Delphi, is that we never got a Delphi edition that could target Raspberry PI (or ARM-Linux in general). It was especially frustrating since Allen Bauer actually demonstrated Delphi generating code that ran on a PI in 2012. The result of not directly supporting the PI, even on service level without a UI layer – is that Delphi developers have missed the IOT market completely.

Before Delphi developers missed the IOT revolution, Delphi also missed out on iOS and Android. By the time Delphi developers could target any of these platforms, the market was completely saturated, and all opportunities to make money was long gone. In other words, Delphi has missed the boat on 3 revolutionary platforms in a row. Something which is borderline unforgivable.

The good news though is that Oxygene, the object-pascal compiler from RemObjects, supports the Raspberry PI SoC. I have yet to test this on v4, but since the PI v4 is 100% backwards compatible I don’t see any reason why there should be any issues. The code generated by Oxygene is not bound to just the PI either. As long as it runs on a debian based distro, it should run just fine on most ARM-Linux SoC’s that have working drivers.

And like I have written about elsewhere, you can also compile for WebAssembly, running either in node.js or in the browser — so there are plenty of ways to get your products over!

Stay tuned for the lineup

This week im going to do a lot of testing on various ARM devices to find out just how many SBC’s Oxygene can target, starting with the ODroid N2. But for Raspberry PI, that should be a slam-dunk. Meaning that object-pascal developers can finally make use of affordable off-the-shelves parts in their hardware projects.

As of writing im preparing the various boards I will be testing. We have the PI 3b+, the Tinkerboard from ASUS, NanoPI, Dragonboard, Odroid XU4 – and the latest power-board, the ODroid N2. Out of these offerings only the N2 is en-par with the Raspberry PI v4, although I suspect the Videocore 6 GPU will outperform the Mali G52.